Colorado law enforcement officials are announcing more aggressive moves against doctors who become conduits for prescription pain pill fraud, including the indictment of a Western Slope doctor mentioned in today’s paper. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver has had a flurry of case announcements in the past year involving doctors and allegations of disturbing patterns of massive pain pill abuse.

Painkiller abuse is rampant, and states like Colorado and New York take far different approaches to the problem (AP photo)

New York state, meanwhile, is taking a broader policy route that some would like Colorado to pursue, but so far there doesn’t appear to be a lot of appetite in the Rocky Mountains for statewide action. As of this week, all controlled substance prescriptions written by New York doctors must be entered into a common Internet database; more importantly, all doctors must now by law consult that database before writing their next prescription. DEA officials in Colorado have said our state’s prescription database, checked on a voluntary basis, is only consulted a small percentage of the time when a doctor writes a new scrip.

Here’s the announcement today from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office:

“I-STOP set up a real-time database that tracks every prescription for opioid pills that gets filled in New York State. Starting today, doctors are required under the law to consult that database before writing any prescriptions for a Schedule II, III, or IV controlled substance, including narcotic painkillers. New York is now the only state in the country with such a verification requirement. This critical tool will provide medical professionals with the information necessary to detect doctor-shoppers and better serve patients at risk of addiction. This information will also serve to avoid potentially dangerous drug interactions.”

Colorado’s actions have tended toward professional responsibility rather than government mandate. The medical societies and emergency rooms have taken measures on educating doctors and patients and limiting some accessibility to pills. But the idea of making a check of Colorado’s database mandatory to stop pill-shopping, for example, doesn’t get much traction yet. Even Democrats who might be more activist on the issue say they are worried about privacy, physician independence, and law enforcement using the databases for fishing expeditions.

Painkiller overdose deaths are growing even faster for women than for men, according to a new CDC study of national statistics, providing some alarm but also some insight into how to combat the problem.

Doctors and pharmacists were still struggling Tuesday to come up with reasons for the sharp increases among women. The CDC said previous research has shown more women vulnerable to chronic pain, or more susceptible to becoming dependent on painkillers, but not all in the medical field are comfortable making those sweeping judgments.

Americans age 15 to 27 are abusing painkillers at a rate 40 percent higher than what is expected for their age group, a sharp change from patterns of abuse in other substances such as marijuana, said Richard Miech. Miech’s peer-reviewed paper is being published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. The higher rates of misuse hold true even when accounting for historically high drug use among youth, and adjusting for changes in drug trends over time, Miech said.

The numbers, drawn from the comprehensive National Survey on Drug Use and Health, bolster growing fears among law enforcement and medical personnel that the wide availability of drugs like oxycodone and methadone are a new danger to teens. Besides developing quick dependence and addiction on the opiate-derived drugs, abusers are also turning to cheaper and more dangerous drugs like heroin as their dependence grows more urgent.

The Centers for Disease Control has estimated nearly 15,000 people are dying each year from prescription painkiller overdoses, more than heroin and cocaine overdoses combined. The increase has come as the number of prescriptions written for the painkillers has quadrupled.

Miech said research appears to show younger users finding easy access to the painkillers in the medicine cabinets of their parents, grandparents and friends. Some may also start their dependence while treating legitimate sports injuries and other chronic pain.

Miech began his research by combing mortality statistics for the 100 most common causes of death. He looked for the fastest-rising causes, and accidental poisonings, 95 percent of which are drug overdoses, jumped off the charts. That’s when he started analyzing the national drug use interviews, a widely respected tool with thousands of subjects, for age patterns.

The numbers are startling on every level, Miech said; he also analyzed mortality by major cities, and pulled out numbers for Colorado.

“Every two days, three people die of drug overdose here in the Denver/Aurora metro area, on average,” he said. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

Under the new federal safety plan, drugmakers must fund training programs to help health professionals safely prescribe painkillers, including morphine, methadone and oxycodone. Thousands of Americans die from overdoses of the drugs each year.

Inappropriate use of the drugs was linked to 425,000 emergency department visits and 15,600 deaths in 2009, the AP reported.

Drug companies will have to offer training for doctors who prescribe the drugs, and the training will be designed by professional health educators – not the drug companies.

This Sunday we’ll be taking a look at the sharp rise in painkiller use in America and in Colorado, the medical evolution that’s behind it, and how the medical community is now working to keep pills in the right hands.

The numbers from every source are stark. Here’s one that wouldn’t even fit into the story, from a CDC report chock full of startling statistics: “By 2010, enough (opioid pain relievers) were sold to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone every 4 hours for 1 month.”

Doctors want the public to know they still back the evolution in pain care, which has brought relief to millions of people whose chronic pain used to be ignored. But they also have fascinating observations about how people feel pain differently, and handle it in a wide variety of ways.

Electa Draper is the health writer for The Denver Post and has covered every news beat in a 22-year journalism career at three newspapers. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in journalism.